Living in Integrity with Ren Hurst Episode 5 Science of harm part 1

New World Sanctuary Foundation In a world where conformity rules ... ... One woman ... ... looked within ... ... and found herself ... ... ... ... A woman who became a trailblazer ... ... Living in integrity with Ren Hurst Hi, Ren Hurst here again. I'm the author of Riding on the Power of Others and this is the 5th video that i'm doing and just to let everybody know, we're gonna put a numbered series together that's going to stay on You Tube so everyone will have access to it. But today, i've decided to try to handle the topic of the science of the harm of riding. So, it's getting a lot of requests and i'm not exactly sure what people are looking for because the science, even though it was really important in my own personal journey for a really well rounded understanding of why i wanted to stop. It really had nothing to do with the moment that changed everything which is written about specifically in my book and the science, as great as it is to be able to prove that it's harmful physically, i don't know if you noticed but my arm is full of tattoos and physical harm is not that big of a deal to me. What is a big deal to me is using someone for my own personal needs and desires and wants and exploitation, which is what makes horseback riding not vegan, not necessarily the physical harm, that's a given. I mean, you're putting a substantial amount of weight on an elongated spine. You don't need to be a scientific expert to understand that there's gonna be harm caused from that. Just walk around on all fours and put somebody that's at least 10% or more of your weight on your back and see how it feels in a little while and you'll know exactly what i'm talking about. However, i do have 10 full years of very dedicated time in the field where i was researching this and trying to learn everything i could. Not to find the harm of the science of riding but just as a holistic horse care professional trying to find how we were harming horses and what worked ans what didn't work and what was real and what wasn't. And i'm a little aversive to scientific research in general because this path of truth has led me down some pretty scary roads where i'm finding that funding specific research can turn into a lot of science that isn't true, much like the science that supports eating meat to give you an example. This is Cash and this is Travis. And Travis is a perfect example here,ok. Let's just start with Travis. Travis is here because early on in my career as a natural hoofcare practitioner, i got a call from a woman who was desperate to try something different because Travis here had foundered very badly and she was married to a vet, they were separated so she knew the veterinary community quite well in the area that i lived and let me tell you something about the area that i lived in Texas. There were probably more horses than humans, it's the cutting horse capital of the world, so there was no shortage of scientific experts in the field of horses to be around which is one of the ways i learned so much, however, this is not a testament to that. So, i got this call and this horse in a tremendous amount of pain and she's heard that i can fix founder. And i'm pretty new, i know how to do it through training but he was actually my very first acute founder case that exhibited all the textbook symptoms of a horse in excruciating pain with severe rotation. So, i show up to meet this horse and he's in a really bad way and i tell her, yeah, there's a lot i can do for him if you'll give me a chance but she was really skeptical because all of the veterinarians around her were telling her that it would be more humans to put him down at this point and that he was in a tremendous amount of pain. And so i told her, just trust me, give me a little time to do what i've been trained to do and we started. And, within 2 to 3 weeks, she couldn't handle it. She couldn't stand seeing him uncomfortable, she couldn't stand thinking about the fact that maybe she had caused it in some way, which i think was probably the bigger aspect of this. And she started calling her other veterinarian friends and asking for their opinion and every single one of them told her to put him down. So, she called me crying one night and said that that's what she was going to do and i pleaded with her and i said i know how to fix this and i know it's not common and i know there's a lot of research out there that says that it can't be done but this is my training and this is what i know how to do and so i asked her if she would just let me come pick him up. So i did the next morning and i took him home and i radically changed his lifestyle to one that was very stress free and natural for him. and in 6 months, i got new xrays of his hooves and his coffin bones were almost completely returned to their natural position. He has no lameness, no sign that he had ever foundered so badly and his story was published in the Horse's Hoof magazine with xrays to show the before and after pictures. And at the time i was really well connected with the scientific horse community in that area of Texas. It went against what everyone said was possible. So, forgive me if i'm not a huge fan of just what science says. And Travis is one of the biggest reasons for that and here he stands with no sign that he's ever foundered and quite honestly before i quit riding and training, this is the horse responsible for teaching an enormous amount of my students that horses could be ridden without bridles, without bits and without shoes in rocky terrain, even after he had foundered. And, you know, there's something to be said about scientific research and then, there's something to be said about living hands on proof and this horse is all the proof that i need to trust what's right in front of me rather than some research that somebody else did and words that somebody else said. That said, these are just words, you have to do your own research and you have to follow your own heart to know what's true about this stuff or not. So, i'll just take you a little bit through my experience. It started with bits because there was just something about putting a piece of metal in a horse's mouth that started really not feeling right to me. And so i started doing the research on that and there's a book out there by Dr Cook and Dr Strasser called Metal in the Mouth. That book is the only thing you'll ever need to never put a piece of metal in a horse's mouth again. And, there's also a book called Riding Free which is about liberty riding that explains that a little bit as well in terms of some of the physical effects of putting a bit in the mouth to control a horse. Bits should be a given. It's a piece of metal going into the sensitive structures of an animal's mouth. And if you really wanna understand what that looks like, get your hands on a horse skull and see where that bit rests and do a little bit of anatomical research and see the nerves and the soft tissues that the bit is sitting on just at rest, before so-called soft hands take a hold of the reins. So, that is the easiest one to debunk in terms of the harm it causes to horses. So, in this 10 years period when i was really advancing my career and getting well connected and spending time with all sorts of experts and all sorts of different areas of holistic study, that's where my learning was coming from. It was hands on, in the field, spending time with these people, getting to know them, having them show me what their work was and how it was applied. I learned so much about the effect of cortisol in the body. Of course, we hear and know about stress in humans but it's not different for horses and i've got to say the most important thing i ever learned was that stress is the thing that kills horses and causes them the most harm. And you don't have to get on a horse to cause a tremendous amount of stress. Just the traditional ways we care for and manage horses are very, very damaging. In fact, one comment that was in response to one of these videos was a woman defending her care of her horse in all sorts of these traditional manners that at this stage is just worlds apart from where my understanding is. Floating teeth every year is extremely damaging, you gotta understand the neurobiology that connects the horse's teeth to the rest of their entire body and how it all works together and i really don't recommend that kind of work. And shoeing horses, i mean, it just depends on where you're at the spectrum of what you understand about horse care in general and how holistic the approach is or how traditional and symptom treating it is. So, there's that, so when we're talking about actually getting on a horse, first of all, i still think it's really important to reiterate that the issue with riding is that you have to condition the horse to accept a rider which is manipulation and coercion and control and exploitation. That is what makes riding horses not vegan. To be continued in the next episode...